Into The Light Of The Dark

I was one of the first children in Germany to get a blackbird. I think it happened around the time of the bombing, although it’s hard to be sure. The birds hardly ever announced their arrival; you would just realize, one day, that one had been staring at you for a long time, the way you realize a room has gone silent. But I think I can pinpoint the birth of mine, in the last year of the war, in Berlin, when people all over the city started whistling in admiration. “WHHHEEeee.” We were eating dinner, but my mother rushed us outside anyway. I understood when I saw the lights in the sky. I could see why people were whistling.

“Look, Mama,” I cried. “How did they get those Christmas trees to fly?”

Mama laughed and then stopped herself. She looked at me. I couldn’t understand how she could laugh and look so sad at the same time. But I don’t think that’s when my blackbird came. I think it came in the next moment, when a Christmas tree landed on our house and blew it into pieces, and my mother, still with that sad look on her face, flew up and away into little pieces just like the house. That’s when my blackbird was born.

I got one of the first blackbirds because I was just the right age. I wasn’t old enough to understand while the war was on. And those who were, never got a blackbird. They had other concerns. To get a blackbird, you had to start understanding when the war was over, when it was too late to do anything. That’s why mine was one of the first; I grew old enough to understand almost immediately after it had ended. I mean, of course, that I was the first to notice my blackbird. They started following us long before we could understand. Once you saw it, once you started understanding, you would see it in your memories as well, and wonder how you’d missed it all that time. I see it, my blackbird, in the memories I have of the bombing; it’s a small gliding speck, high over the heads of the Russian soldiers marching into Berlin; it’s perched, with ruffled feathers, on a suitcase resting next to a spectral refugee from Dresden; its yellow beak and polished black eyes peer out from the gloom of a secret room in the workshop of a family friend.

I know the older ones never got blackbirds because my father never had one, even after he came back safely from the war in the East. He was thinner than I remembered and he’d lost more of his hair, but he laughed at seeing my little brother and me, and he cried on hearing about Mama and the Christmas tree. He promised us that we would get a new house and make everything the way it was before, although I could hardly remember before, and we would make Mama so proud of our strong family. I hadn’t yet noticed the blackbirds then, but I now know this wasn’t the behaviour of a man who had one following him around. That’s how I know it was just my generation.

My father told us all about the war. He told us about a country so cold, you could die if you breathed deeply, and the freezing air reached your heart, and about the enemy who came thick as an Egyptian plague, and about the picture of us he looked at to give him courage and to remember why he was fighting.

“Did you shoot at people, Papa?”

“Yes, Üschi, and they shot at me. That’s what men do in a war.”

“Were you frightened?”

“Sometimes, but you would have been proud of me. I always did the right thing, even when it was difficult. Not everyone had the stomach for it, but I stepped up and volunteered. That’s how I got promoted.”

“What did you have to do, Papa? What did you have the stomach for?”

Papa lit a cigarette. We were sitting on the foundations of our old house. I wasn’t allowed to play in the rubble that covered the city but Papa let me sort through our old things to see if there was anything left we could use.

“Some of the duties were only for the real soldiers,” he said. “If you proved you were truly dedicated, they would give you the special duties and you would get a promotion.”

“What duties?”

Papa rose and turned back to the hollow of our home. “Come, Üschi,” he said. “Time we attend to our duties here.”

That was when my blackbird flew back to me. It was perched on a stone by my father’s knee. I saw it when I noticed there was a gap between what my father knew and what he told me, and I felt that the bird had somehow flown through that gap. Except the bird had been perched there for a long time. Maybe since my mother had flown into the sky on that spot.

In the years after the war, as I grew older and got on with living in peacetime, I hardly noticed the bird anymore. All of the work we put into rebuilding, the deprivations, the occupying forces, I accepted it as part of the new reality. I grew to recognize others with blackbirds following them around. I saw children, younger than I was, grow up, and as understanding dawned on them, they would notice their blackbirds too. They multiplied, flying out of all the things our parents left unsaid.

It was only years later, once the rubble had been cleared and we were stable again, that the blackbird started to irritate me. It was all that remained of the war, but it wouldn’t go away. It grew heavy.

At first, I tried to ignore it, but that only made it worse. It felt slighted, and took to demanding attention. It would hide behind, say, a sign at a memorial site, and then leap out, cawing, swatting my face with its wings. So I took a different tack. I gave it all the attention it wanted. I spent years nursing it, indulging it, keeping it close. I volunteered with Jewish charities. I voted liberal. I even made a pilgrimage to Israel.

It was in Israel that I had a revelation. My travelling companion and I were walking, and I set out to cross a road. I didn’t see the truck coming, about to run me over, but my friend did, and he shouted for me to stop. “Halt!” he cried out. I did stop, and in the next moment we heard the sound of smashing glass. It came from behind us. We turned to see an old Israeli woman lying unconscious on the side walk, a broken bottle of milk at her side. I saw a number tattooed on her outstretched wrist, and I knew what had happened. The blackbird fluttered around her, cawing, splashing milk. We spoke an evil tongue, one she had escaped, and here we had brought it to her in the least likely place, at the least likely moment. She fainted on the spot.

I knew after that, that I would never be rid of the blackbird. But still hoped I might be able to pass it on.

The blackbird, I reasoned, was a gift. My father had given it to me. That was why, when I discovered I was pregnant, I took it upon myself to learn my father’s secrets. He had died years earlier, but in his papers I found the name of his unit. By then, there were libraries and museums dedicated to the secrets of the war – I wasn’t the only person of my generation to develop a penchant for research. Maybe the others had had the same thought. I pieced together my father’s story and I learned what he’d had the stomach for. Not everybody got a promotion like his. It was reserved for those with a sense of duty so strong that they could volunteer to do the dirty work, and willingly set their humanity aside to carry out the wishes of their Leader. They loved their country so much that they personally lined up the prisoners, the inferior people from that frigid country and personally pulled the trigger. Then personally buried the dead like turds in a latrine hole.

I discovered my father’s secret so I could bury it again. After you were born, I hid his papers and bit my tongue, and I told you to be proud of your grandfather, and the blackbird flew through the gap in my words. Now I watch your eyes for understanding. And every time I see you tell a friend that your family was different, every time I see you come home from school with questions on your face that you never ask, I see the blackbird fly a little farther from me, and closer to you.